When Liu Lanzhi woke, night had already fallen.
The faint glow of candlelight flickered against the carved wooden walls of the chamber, casting long shadows that swayed with the wind. The space beside her was cold and empty.
He was gone.
For a moment, she lay still, staring at the canopy above her, listening to the distant sound of rain. Her body felt weak, every muscle aching dully as if she had been ill for days. She could not tell how long she had slept, only that her limbs protested the slightest movement.
Outside, heavy rain poured relentlessly over the palace. From the partially open balcony doors, she could hear the wind howling through the corridors, carrying the scent of damp stone and wet earth. Dark clouds swallowed the sky, and the storm showed no signs of passing.
Liu Lanzhi's fingers curled slowly into the bedding.
She remembered this day.
In her previous life, she had awakened in this very chamber—confused, frightened, and broken. That night, her innocence had been taken by the crown prince she loathed the most. At that time, she had been nothing more than his prisoner. She had not yet developed feelings for him. She had resisted him openly, desperately, foolishly.
And she had paid the price.
Her breathing grew shallow as memory after memory surfaced.
With trembling hands, Liu Lanzhi looked down at her body. A thick blanket covered her, warm and heavy. Her heart pounded violently in her chest as she hesitated.
She expected blood. She prepared herself for it.
Slowly, she lifted the edge of the sheet.
The sheets were crumpled from her restless sleep, but they were clean. Pure white. Untouched.
She stared, uncomprehending.
Then she checked again, her movements clumsy and frantic. Beneath the blanket, she wore a thin sleeping robe. Her body felt sore, exhausted—but there was no pain where there should have been.
No tearing pain.
No blood.
No proof of what should have happened.
Her hands clenched into the fabric.
This was wrong.
Yun Qingyu should have sealed her fate last night.
She sat in the stillness, waiting for understanding to come. It did not. She searched her memory for any deviation, any moment in her previous life where he had shown restraint. There was none. He had taken what he wanted without hesitation, and she had been too young, too frightened, too powerless to stop him.
So why now?
Was this a test? A longer game she did not yet understand? Or had something else changed—something she could not see?
Her mind raced through possibilities, but none of them fit. Yun Qingyu did not wait. He did not deny himself. Whatever his reasons, she could not trust them.
She let out a slow breath and forced herself to move.
Liu Lanzhi wrapped herself in a thicker silk robe and rose from the bed. Her legs wobbled as she stood, but she forced herself upright and made her way toward the vanity table. Each step sent a dull throb through her ribs, but she welcomed the pain. It kept her present.
Everything in the chamber was exactly as she remembered.
Candlelight flickered against the mirror, and she leaned closer, studying the face that stared back at her.
Smooth. Youthful. Untouched by scars.
The disfiguring wound that once ruined her right eye was gone.
She reached up to touch her cheek, fingers trembling as she confirmed what her eyes had already told her. The skin was whole. Unbroken. This face belonged to a woman who had not yet lived through the years that would carve her into someone else.
She lowered her hand slowly.
In her previous life, she had cleared Yun Qingyu's path to the throne. She had believed she was building something with him—that her sacrifices meant something, that the blood on her hands would buy her a place at his side. She had eliminated rivals, endured whispers, swallowed her pride until she no longer remembered the taste of it.
And once her usefulness ended, he had turned his back on her completely.
He had thrown her into the cold palace while Su Yue—his chosen empress—took everything she had been promised. The position. The status. The future she had bled for.
He had killed their only child.
She had not even been allowed to hold the body before they took it away. One moment there had been a heartbeat beneath her hand, a fragile warmth that was half her. The next, nothing. And Yun Qingyu had looked at her with those cold eyes and said nothing. Not a word of grief. Not a flicker of regret. As if the child had never existed at all.
Her fingers pressed against the vanity's edge until the wood bit into her palms.
Even her most trusted attendant had betrayed her.
The woman who had dressed her hair, brewed her tea, listened to her fears in the dark of night—she had been feeding information to Su Yue from the beginning. Every whispered hope, every secret fear, every moment of weakness had been catalogued and delivered to the woman who would replace her.
If it were not for the so-called prophecy—that she bore the fate of a phoenix—would Yun Qingyu have spared her a single glance?
Or had she been a fake phoenix from the very beginning?
A bitter laugh nearly escaped her lips, but she swallowed it. Not yet. There would be time for bitterness later.
She stared at her reflection, at the face that had not yet learned to hate.
In her previous life, she had been blind. She had mistaken patience for tenderness, control for care. She had given everything to a man who saw her as a tool, then wondered why he discarded her when the tool was no longer useful.
This face—smooth, young, unscarred—had not yet made those mistakes.
She reached up again, pressing her palm flat against her cheek. The skin was warm. Alive. The wound that would one day ruin her right eye had not yet been carved into her flesh. The years of isolation, of grief, of slow poison seeping through her veins—none of it had happened yet.
Or none of it would happen at all.
That was the difference.
In her previous life, she had been given nothing. No warning. No second chance. She had walked into Yun Qingyu's palace with her eyes half-closed, too proud to see the cage closing around her until the bars were already locked.
Now, she had something she had never possessed before.
She knew exactly what he was.
She knew what Su Yue was.
She knew which smiles hid knives and which hands would reach for her throat when her back was turned.
The sheets were clean. Her face was unmarked. The worst of it had not happened yet—or would not happen at all.
That was the gift she had been given. Not power. Not immortality. Just time.
Time to rebuild. Time to prepare. Time to ensure that when the people who had destroyed her made their moves, they would find nothing but empty air where their victim should have been.
A sound escaped her—not quite a laugh, not quite a sob. It caught in her throat and stayed there, lodged somewhere between relief and grief.
She let it fade.
Then she straightened her shoulders, meeting her own gaze in the mirror.
In her previous life, she had been blind.
This time, she would see clearly.
She would not waste this second chance. She would not trust where trust had already cost her everything. She would learn from the woman she had been—the woman who had loved too easily, believed too quickly, given too much—and she would become something that woman could not have imagined.
She would see exactly who dared to harm her.
And she would make them pay.
The candlelight flickered, shadows shifting across her face. For a moment, she looked almost like a stranger—someone harder, colder, more patient than the woman who had entered this palace the first time.
Perhaps that was exactly who she needed to become.
Liu Lanzhi exhaled slowly and turned away from the mirror.
Outside, the rain had begun to ease. The wind no longer howled through the corridors, and the distant rumble of thunder had faded to silence. Morning would come soon. When it did, she would rise, dress, and face whatever Yun Qingyu had planned for her.
But this time, she would not be the woman he expected.
This time, she would be something he could not predict.
She climbed back into the bed, lying still beneath the heavy blankets, and closed her eyes. Sleep did not come easily, but she did not need it to. She only needed to rest, to gather her strength, to prepare for what came next.
When dawn finally broke over the palace, Liu Lanzhi opened her eyes.
She was ready.